ProStores Tips and Tutorials – One Take Media

Welcome to the first post in a series of four.

Today’s post will be about Google Analytics filters and how to use them as well as some aspects that are unique to the ProStores/StoreFront environment.

What are filters? Just like on your Brita, filters strain out the unwanted. In the case of Google Analytics, filters can be set up to strain out unwanted information, but can also help to add more information that you can’t see by default.

This first tip isn’t for the Filters section but it will help to filter out the sessions that are created and mess up your statistics.

Setting up Exclusions
1. Log in to your GA account
2. Click Analytics Settings
3. Click Profile Settings
4. Click Edit (located directly across from “Main Website Profile Information” right below “Check Status”.
5. Go to “Exclude URL Query Parameters:” this is where you’ll type in your query parameters that you want GA to ignore. (Now if you are not hosted with ProStores Directly, i.e. with Homestead, Serrahost, NeoVerve, your url structure may be a bit different. If you are, post your store in the comments and I’ll update this post.)
6. Type in “cart_id,sfs,smode,searchpath”

How to Set up a Filter to Block your IP Address

1. First, figure out your own IP address
2. The easiest way to do this is go to a website like Whatsmyip.com, where you will see a huge number at the top of the webpage displaying your IP address.
3. Make a copy of this (ctrl c)
4. Go to Filter Manager> Add Filter
5. Paste this into the first so it can be entered in the “filter manager”.
6. Name your filter so you, or anyone else can identify what it is
7. Select from the pull-down menu “exclude all traffic from an IP address”
8. Paste in the IP address. Note: use the “\” expression in front of the “.”. Example 63\.212\.171
9. Click Finish

If you want to block a range, like your home or business network, please read Google’s article on Regular Expressions.

This was an example of how to filter out information.

Filtering in the Full Referrer of a site that has sent you traffic.
You’ll often get visits from forums or blogs that append their URLs and just show you the last section of the link rather than the entire link. This often leaves you with links like /forums/index.php. That’s not much use to you, so to make sure you know where people actually came from, set up a filter with the following settings:

1. Enter the Filter manager
2. Click “+ Add Filter”
3. Enter the filter name (like “Full Referral”) and select “Custom filter” from the drop-down box
4. From the radio buttons you select “Advanced”
5. For “Field A -> Extract A” you select “Referral” from the drop-down box and in the text field you enter “(.*)” (to select the entire URL)
6. Leave Field B empty and set “Output To -> Constructor” to “User Defined”. In the text field you enter “$A1″ to refer to the first selection of field A.

Your end result should be like this:

You can track this information by going to Custom Reports and selecting User Defined under the Dimensions section and then setting up whatever Metrics you want to measure that dimension by. Ian Lurie of Conversation Marketing will be covering Custom Reporting in one of his guest posts.

Please feel free to ask any questions you would like in the comments, comments are moderated but will be approved quickly!